Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project estimates crustal thermal energy reserves at 15 million zetajoules. Coal + oil + gas + methane hydrates amount to 630 zetajoules. That means there is 23,800 times as much geothermal energy in Earth’s crust as there is chemical energy in fossil fuels everywhere on the planet.
The four main next-generation geothermal concepts I will discuss do the same thing. They (1) locate and access heat, (2) transfer subsurface heat to a working fluid and bring it to the surface, and (3) exploit the heat energy at the surface through direct use or conversion to electricity. It is the second step, transferring subsurface heat to a working fluid, that is non-obvious.

Three types -
1) Enhanced geothermal systems - usual hydrothermal features one or more injection wells and production wells from where steam comes out. Mostly relies on rocks and structures for surface heat transfer and ensuring that steam doesn't come out of other sources except the production wells. Fervo startup is doing this.
2) Closed-loop geothermal systems - does this through pipes - smaller surface area more expensive drilling are cons. Pros are non water fluids with lower supercritical temperatures can be used. Startup Eavor from Germany is trying to do this.
3) Heat roots - single vertical shaft. From the base of the shaft, they frack downwards to create a fracture pattern that gives the impression of a root system for a tree. They fill this “root” system with a convective and conductive fluid. Then, using a pipe-in-pipe system, they circulate a separate working fluid from the surface to the base of the shaft and back. At the base of the shaft, a heat exchanger takes the energy concentrated by the heat root system and imparts it to the working fluid. Startup Sage is doing this in Texas.
4) Supercritical EGS - drilling straight to the earth cheaply so that we can get fluids at supercritical temperatures. A huge potential advantage would be the ability to retrofit existing coal plants. With many coal plants shutting down in the next several years, a lot of valuable generator equipment could be lying around idle. These generators take supercritical steam as an input and use it to produce electricity. -Quaise company is doing this

proteins do more than serve as the building blocks of the body — the ones that serve as mostly static structural components are actually a special case. More generally, proteins are self-assembling nanomachines that do almost everything in the body. Your cellular processes — everything which can be said to make you alive — are tasks carried out by proteins.
Proteins are defined linearly. They are coded by strings of nucleotides in your DNA and RNA. They are formed by chains of amino acids reacting with each other. But despite this simple linear identity, proteins act in time and space. Once produced, atomic forces cause them to self-assemble into messy 3D structures that determine their function. Proteins are fundamental to pharmaceutical research, where scientists are often trying to find a molecule that will activate or inactivate a particular protein. Since we only know the structures of around a quarter of the proteins in the human body, this has often been a trial-and-error effort. By using AlphaFold 2 or its successors to create a catalog of the structures of every protein humans can produce, scientists will be able to reason about which molecules could be good candidate drugs, dramatically reducing the error rate. This, in turn, could turbocharge drug development and enable the discovery of cures for almost every disease. We may even discover that already-approved drugs can be used to treat conditions we hadn’t tried them on yet.
In a future pandemic where we might not have experience with similar kind of a virus in the past, the ability to map the structure of its proteins, we could determine what kind of molecule would be needed to inactivate it. nstead of blindly experimenting with random antimalarials, we could reason about which existing drugs could be a first-wave therapeutic. This could save countless lives.
There are a few caveats though -
1) Protein nanomachinery is dynamic, but AlphaFold only predicts fixed protein structures. This limitation is a consequence of the fact that our existing techniques for empirically determining the structure of a protein — X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy — capture a static structure only. This static picture is the ground truth against which AlphaFold was trained. While AlphaFold has essentially solved the static structure prediction problem, there is a further rabbit hole of dynamic behavior to understand.
2) The time to actually operationally adapt it might take many years before we see it having any real influence in the world.

An inspiring overview of what's to come in the next decade. Some highlights.
- Paraphrased: The Great Stagnation is over. The roaring twenties are just beginning.
- Energy
- "Batteries will never match fossil fuels’ energy density" - "Commercial aviation can’t electrify"
- Nuclear fusion possible but still a decade out.
- Geothermal seems most interesting.
- Transportation
- Urban air mobility - likely non-viable if pilot is required so automation (and regulation) will be key.
- Nationwide Hyperloop probably a decade out.
- Space
- "Trade (on Earth) is roughly inverse-linear in transport costs."
- SpaceX is incredibly impressive
- Starlink - won't serve cities - will serve 3% of market that's not currently served - still $72b market.
- Thesis - SpaceX uses Starlink revenue to accelerate Mars projects
- "The 2020s will be the decade that makes or breaks cryptocurrency"
- By the middle of the decade, augmented reality will be widely deployed, in the same way that smart watches are today.
- Glasses will be computing devices. Every big tech company has a glasses project at a relatively mature stage in the lab today.